Think there's no suitable space left in your urban neighborhood for growing sustainable local food? Think again. As awareness grows about the positive impact environmentally sustainable, local food farms and gardens can have on local economies and public health, new urban and suburban food gardens are sprouting in some surprising places. Here are just a few innovative gardens in creative locations that may change the way city residents think about where good food comes from:
Real Food Grows in a Food Court
Urban and suburban shopping malls were already struggling to stay competitive with internet retailers and big box discount stores, even before the recession of 2008 devastated retail sales. And now, after two long years of general economic malaise, many once-thriving malls are riddled with vacant storefronts.
As traditional retail tenants disappear, mall managers across the country face a serious dilemma: how can shopping malls, once economic centers in their communities, fill vacant spaces and keep drawing customers without relying on retail chain stores?
This spring, the marketing staff at the Galleria at Erieview in Cleveland, Ohio, came up with an innovative solution to their problem of unused, unprofitable architectural space: plant a sustainable food garden.
The mall's airy, sunlit food court sits beneath a giant dome of glass. Perhaps it was inevitable that Galleria marketing director Vicky Pool, whose grandfather owned a plant nursery, would look up at the food court's glass ceiling one day and realize just how strongly the space resembled a greenhouse.
Gardens Under Glass is now producing sustainably grown salad greens, herbs, and tomatoes that will supply the Galleria mall's restaurants with super fresh, super local ingredients.

Novella Carpenter took over a vacant lot on a hardscrabble corner of West Oakland eight years ago and turned it into a working farm of vegetables, goats, rabbits and, sometimes, pigs.

Carpenter milked goats, made cheese and ate much of the produce. She also wrote a popular book, "Farm City," about the experience and became an icon of the Bay Area's urban farming movement.

But the future of her Ghost Town Farm is in question. This week, Oakland officials suggested it may need to close. The reason: She sells excess produce and needs a costly permit to do so.

"It seems ridiculous," said Carpenter, 38. "I need a conditional use permit to sell chard?"

The news stunned the region's urban farmers and their supporters, who questioned how a fundamental human task that goes back millennia could become illegal.

"It's incredibly sad that people can't grow food and sell it to folks," said Barbara Finnin, executive director of City Slicker Farms, an Oakland nonprofit that runs produce markets and helps people start their own urban farms.

Profit, not personal use

The city planner who visited Carpenter's 4,500-square-foot plot at 28th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way said he sympathized with Carpenter, but the rules are clear.

Carpenter "is raising these things for a profit," said Chris Candell, a planner in the city's building department. "If you're doing this for your own home consumption, this would not be applied."

Though his report is not final, Candell said Carpenter probably has three options: pay for a conditional use permit, shut down the farm, or not change anything and face sanctions from the city.

The permit would probably cost several thousand dollars, Candell said, and Carpenter also would have to pay penalties for operating without such a license as she is now. Carpenter works about 25 hours per week at the farm and takes in only about $2,500 a year, before expenses.

Candell said a complaint about rabbits on the property led to the city inquiry. Carpenter believes the critic was upset because she was making rabbit potpies available for an $8 donation.

Carpenter taught herself to grow food and raise livestock. She went Dumpster diving in Oakland's Chinatown to feed her pigs and learned how to butcher from top chefs.